On Sun, 2013-01-27 at 12:30 -0500, Shaun McCance wrote:
> So what I think this leaves us with is character classes
> [abc], ranges [a-c], and negations [^abc], there "^" and
> "]" must never appear unless backslash-escaped, "-" may
> be backslash-escaped or put at the beginning or end, the
> escape sequences "\n", "\r", "\t", "\d", and "\D" may be
> used, and literal "\" is escaped as "\\".
>
> Importantly, you must never have an unescaped backslash,
> because some dialects may treat it as the beginning of
> an escape sequence that means something special.
>
> This is a very limited subset, but I think it's what we
> have to use. I'm now going to try to make a portable RE
> that matches these portable RE character classes.
Upon further investigation, it seems some engines allow Unicode
characters outside 0-9 for \d, so that's out too. There's an open
question of what characters can be referred to. I decided to use
the definition of Char in XML 1.0:
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#charsets
It's hard to reference these, because many of the range boundary
characters are unassigned, so effectively unprintable. I think
we don't want to embed the literal character U+D7FF in the spec.
Here is the proposed regular expression escaped with XML numeric
character entities, as if it were put into an XML document:
^(\.|
\[^?-?(([&#x09;&#x0A;&#x0D;&#x20;-&#x2C;&#x2E-&#x5B;&#x5F;-&#xD7FF;&#xE000;-&#xFFFD;&#x10000;-#x10FFFF;]|\\n|\\r|\\t|\\]|\\^|\\-|\\\\)(-([&#x09;&#x0A;&#x0D;&#x20;-&#x2C;&#x2E-&#x5B;&#x5F;-&#xD7FF;&#xE000;-&#xFFFD;&#x10000;-#x10FFFF;]|\\n|\\r|\\t|\\]|\\^|\\-|\\\\))?)+-?\])?$
(Email will almost certainly add line breaks. Ignore them.)
There are two ways I know of to escape characters (not bytes) in
different engines: \x{2234} and \u2234. The \u syntax can only
reference Plane 1 characters, and works in everything except XSD
and Perl/PCRE. The \x{} syntax is only Perl/PCRE, but can specify
any character.
Here it is with \x{}, for Perl/PCRE only:
^(\.|
\[^?-?(([\x{09}\x{0A}\x{0D}\x{20}-\x{2C}\x{2E-\x{5B}\x{5F}-\x{D7FF}\x{E000}-\x{FFFD}\x{10000}-#x10FFFF}]|\\n|\\r|\\t|\\]|\\^|\\-|\\\\)(-([\x{09}\x{0A}\x{0D}\x{20}-\x{2C}\x{2E-\x{5B}\x{5F}-\x{D7FF}\x{E000}-\x{FFFD}\x{10000}-#x10FFFF}]|\\n|\\r|\\t|\\]|\\^|\\-|\\\\))?)+-?\])?$
And here is a regular expression that matches a subset of our
subset, limited to Plane 1, with the \u escape:
^(\.|\[^?-?(([\u0009\u000A\u000D\u0020-\u002C\u002E-\u005B\u005F-\uD7FF
\uE000-\uFFFD]|\\n|\\r|\\t|\\]|\\^|\\-|\\\\)(-([\u0009\u000A\u000D
\u0020-\u002C\u002E-\u005B\u005F-\uD7FF\uE000-\uFFFD\u10000-#x10FFFF]|\
\n|\\r|\\t|\\]|\\^|\\-|\\\\))?)+-?\])?$
And remember, the backslashes and escaped backslashes are significant
to the regular expression engine. If you're putting that into a string
in a language like Java or C#, you need to escape the escapes:
re = new Regex("^(\\.|\\[^?-?(([\\u0009\\u000A\\u000D\\u0020-\\u002C\
\u002E-\\u005B\\u005F-\\uD7FF\\uE000-\\uFFFD]|\\\\n|\\\\r|\\\\t|\\\\]|\\
\\^|\\\\-|\\\\\\\\)(-([\\u0009\\u000A\\u000D\\u0020-\\u002C\\u002E-\
\u005B\\u005F-\\uD7FF\\uE000-\\uFFFD]|\\\\n|\\\\r|\\\\t|\\\\]|\\\\^|\\\
\-|\\\\\\\\))?)+-?\\])?$");
--
Shaun